Technical Lead Manager

Instabase; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance

401(k) with matching

Parental leave and fertility benefits

Lunch credit for in-office work

Job summary

Instabase in San Francisco is seeking a Technical Lead Manager (TLM) for AI Systems & Agents. This hands-on role requires designing and implementing cutting-edge agent capabilities and mentoring a small team of engineers. You will work with advanced technologies to automate complex tasks for top enterprises.

With 8+ years of experience in software engineering, you will lead the development of our next-generation SuperApp, enhancing unstructured data processing. Compensation ranges from $230,000 to $270,000 plus benefits.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional engineering experience.
• Experience building production-grade LLM applications.
• Proven track record of mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities

• Architect stateful agent loops for execution.
• Build secure execution sandboxes for code.
• Scale high-performance systems for user experience.

Skills

Software Engineering

AI Systems Engineering

Team Leadership

Multi-Agent Workflows

API Development

Education

BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Go

Python

Docker

AWS

Kubernetes

Job description

At Instabase, we're passionate about democratizing access to cutting-edge AI innovation to enable any organization to solve previously unsolvable unstructured data problems in their industry. With customers representing some of the largest and most complex organizations in the world, and investors like Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz, and Index Ventures, our market opportunity is near infinite.

Instabase offers a consumption-based pricing model where customers can pay only for what they use, aligning directly with the value our products deliver. It empowers our clients to explore our AI Hub platform features extensively, enabling them to uncover crucial business insights. This customer-centric model allows Instabase to glean insights from diverse use cases and behaviors, ensuring we deliver top-tier solutions that provide unmatched advantages for everyday business operations.

With offices in San Francisco and Bengaluru, Instabase is a truly global company. We are people-first, and we've built a fearlessly experimental, endlessly curious, customer-obsessed team who work together and help organizations around the world turn their unstructured data into insights instantly.

Technical Lead Manager (TLM) — AI Systems & Agents

About Instabase And The Evolution Of Our Business Model

Instabase is the pioneer in helping the world’s largest enterprises—including global banks, insurance leaders, and healthcare giants—unlock and automate value from unstructured data. Our core platform is the industry standard for reading, understanding, and processing complex, unstructured documents at massive scale.

As a strategic addition to our current business model, we are building SuperApp, our natively multimodal, stateful AI assistant and autonomous agent platform. SuperApp represents the next evolution of Instabase: moving from passive document extraction to active, self-correcting agentic execution. By combining our enterprise-grade document understanding with secure, real-time sandboxed code execution, SuperApp enables users to not only parse unstructured data but programmatically act on it, write and run execution scripts, orchestrate complex software tools over Model Context Protocol (MCP), and complete open-ended reasoning tasks in a secure environment.

To lead the engineering team behind this next-generation capability, we are seeking an elite, hands-on Technical Lead Manager (TLM) — AI Systems & Agents.

The Role: Player-Coach Leadership

This is an high-impact, low-bureaucracy role designed for a world-class systems engineer and builder. We keep our teams intentionally lean and fast. You will serve as a Player-Coach leading a tight, elite squad of 3 to 5 AI systems engineers.

At Instabase, we believe managers of small teams should stay close to the metal. Your time will be split:

• 60% to 70% Hands-on Engineering: Actively designing multi-turn agent loops, writing production code, building secure sandboxing environments, and architecting systems.
• 30% to 40% Leadership & Mentorship: Recruiting top-tier talent, mentoring engineers, reviewing PRs, and aligning product roadmaps with technical execution.

What You Will Do

• Architect Stateful Agent Loops: Design and implement highly reliable, multi-turn agentic planning and execution state machines capable of self-correction, tool orchestration, and long-context memory persistence.
• Build Secure Execution Sandboxes: Own the runtime execution layer where model-generated code (such as Python data-analysis scripts) is safely isolated, monitored, and run in real-time without compromising enterprise security boundaries.
• Pioneer Tool Orchestration & MCP: Expand our agent capabilities by designing composable tool-calling integrations using Model Context Protocol (MCP) and custom API interfaces.
• Build Evaluation & Trajectory Testing Harnesses: Establish programmatic frameworks (using LLM-as-a-judge and trajectory evaluations) to test if agent loops, tool-calling selections, and error recoveries behave safely and deterministically.
• Scale High-Performance Systems: Work on deep systems problems including latency optimization, semantic caching, speculative execution, and streaming intermediate agent states for a responsive user experience.
• Scale the Team: Bootstrap, hire, and mentor a small, elite, high-velocity team of software and AI engineers.

Our Technical Stack

• Orchestration & Frameworks: LangGraph, LangChain, Go/Python, React, Node, Next.js.
• Infrastructure & Security: Secure sandboxed runtimes (Docker, gVisor, WebAssembly), GCP, AWS, Kubernetes, Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB), Redis, Pub/Sub.
• AI & Models: Integration with advanced reasoning models (GPT-4o, o3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, DeepSeek) across custom function-calling, LLM fine-tuning, and hybrid vector-search RAG pipelines.
• Standards: Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool schemas and APIs.

About You

• 8+ Years of Professional Engineering Experience: A strong, proven background in software engineering, with significant tenure building and scaling backend systems, infrastructure, or platform services.
• Active LLM & Agentic Engineering Experience: Practical, hands-on experience building production-grade LLM applications, multi-agent workflows (using DAGs or state machines), or tool-calling executors.
• Systems & Infrastructure Rigor: Deep familiarity with building secure sandboxed runtimes, container isolation, API platforms, caching strategies, or high-throughput real-time data streaming.
• Small-Team Leadership Experience: Proven track record of mentoring senior engineers, driving technical design reviews, and leading high-velocity squads as a Tech Lead, TLM, or hands-on EM.
• An Active Builder: You love writing code. You are excited about the prospect of coding daily and staying out of the meetings and administrative bloat of traditional big-tech management.
• Educational Background: BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a highly quantitative field.

Compensation

The base salary range for this role is $230,000 to $270,000 + bonus, equity, and benefits. The actual pay may vary based on factors such as location, experience, and skills.

US Benefits

• Flexible PTO
• Comprehensive Coverage: Top-notch medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) with Matching
• Parental Leave & Fertility Benefits
• Therapy Sessions Covered: Mental health matters—10 free sessions through Samata Health.
• Wellness Stipend
• Lunch on Us: Enjoy a lunch credit when you're in the office.

Instabase is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status. Research shows that in order to apply for a job, women feel they need to meet 100% of the criteria while men usually apply after meeting about 60%. Regardless of how you identify, if you believe you can do the job and are a good match, we encourage you to apply.